"There will be just one .NET going forward, and you will be able to use it to target Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS and WebAssembly and more."
Office for Linux would be easy, but that’s not going to happen.
My companies online outlook shows that MS is adding clones of all the tools (slack/trello).
They’ve been successful and monitizing in this new era
I haven't used Office in years and don't know anyone who has, so I'm not sure how big of a priority it is to add platforms to a product like that.
I have a hard time believing it would be easy. I use both Office for Windows and Mac, and the differences are great enough that I'm guessing that there's a huge amount of divergent code in the UIs. And both would be written against GUI toolkits that are not present on Linux, so a Linux port would be yet another major effort.
That said, I think that you're right that it's not going to happen. My understanding is that a major consideration for anyone looking to port a commercial desktop product to Linux is that Linux desktop users are, in the broad, very hesitant to spend $100s on a commercial product when open source alternatives exist. My guess would be that a Linux port of Office just isn't a proposition that is likely to generate positive profits.
But "Desktop Linux" will always be a million support headaches for no market share; which begs the question "Dear Lord, why?"
The actual problem is the lack of Group Policy support (or even a viable equivalent - preferably one that's cross-platform).
The only part of "Office" I really even use though is Outlook (at work), and it's pretty good at the job it does.
[0] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/how-to-install-and-...
Enterprises don't just use free OSS software like that. They'll use Redhat or some other corporate-backed variant, and in the end the license cost will be the same but most software and drivers don't work, users will need to be retrained, and support costs will rise dramatically. They can't even use .NET to build any internal desktop apps either.
It's a terrible deal.
I tried some googling but the results seems to be all speculation. Is this really happening?
Surely they could make it performant in the default mode that everybody uses now that it’s 2019 and we have megahertz to spare? There is no excuse for Word’s atrocious performance.
The problem with page layout mode is that any non-trivial format change, insertion, or deletion requires repagination and the UI freezes until that is completed. Draft mode repaginates asynchronously so that it remains responsive. Comparing a WYSIWYG editor to a plain text editor is no contest as the former performs much more work to layout the text.
Painfully (and randomly shifting) inaccurate in print layout on documents that involve more than just text, sure, I see that every day.
I thought they published an article that explicitly mentions RN but I can't find it at the moment. MS has also been heavily working on RN for Windows including a C++ bridge that significantly increases the performance of the JS to native bridge.
Arguably a large part of the reason that Linux isn't used in offices is because MS Office isn't available. Of course it's in Microsoft's interest to keep it that way.
They have the right idea today, embrace server-side Linux with .Net Core, and soon, .Net 5. That's what Linux is primarily intended for, it's a server kernel and where the action is in regards to that ecosystem. There's a reason some of the code in X11 hasn't been touched in 20 years.
She didn't have to know anything about linux to use it. The same is true for a lot of people. More so in a corporate environment with dedicated staff to handle the harder problems. Hell, most people in offices could get away with a Chromebook and Office 365 today.
Of course, general use laptops and proper linux support are not things that are very common. That part truly sucks. And, yeah, it's not pre-installed for the most part except for some boutique vendors and a couple Dell offerings.
Aside:
Have had a few looks at System 76 lately. May change out my mid-2014 rmbp next year. Unfortunately it's one of the last systems with NVidia, and the metal 2 support for the 750M doesn't work well at all. I'm also probably going to change my desktop to Linux in a few months. Hackintosh support is all but going away, and although I could change out my GTX 1080 with a next gen Navi for hackintosh, but I just don't want to support the mac platform anymore, and my 1080 has a lot of life left in it.
It only really breaks if you want to customise it (or your hardware is badly supported).
For 95% of business users, these online editions have all the capabilities they need without the install headache and are much easier to maintain and update. Office Desktop just had a refresh too but there's basically 0% Linux business users to spend the millions in development costs for a variant.
Remember 20 years ago, when .NET wasn't just a managed software development platform? It was a company-wide strategy[1] that was meant to encompass more-or-less their entire product line. The whole Microsoft future was .NET, and they were going to have a .NET edition of Windows, SQL Server, Exchange, etc.
Since then, those plans have been dropped, Microsoft's (.NET-based) preferred GUI toolkits, WinForms and WPF, were replaced by one that is .NET-compatible but not .NET-native, etc. etc. .NET just isn't as central to Microsoft's identity as it was 20 years ago.
Which, I'm guessing, means that the .NET team is now a lot freer to go cross-platform without inviting the wrath of the Windows team.
There is not much of Windows team to wield the wrath:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/windows-leader-terry...
https://kennykerr.ca/2019/01/25/the-state-of-cpp-on-windows/
Read towards the end.
This spawned a lot of interesting academic work that influenced languages such as Rust... trying to get high level features and safety without need for a runtime.
But it's clear now that 1) Windows has zero chance of taking a significant market share away from Linux in the cloud and 2) cloud technology is an important area of growth for MS.
Satya probably sees that stubbornly sticking to Windows just isn't going to work anymore, so it's better to play nice with the others.
It's sad how so many articles and comments come off just pure PR now. Not saying your comment is, but I have to wonder how much of the "news", comments and internet content is now just PR.
If you mean .NET Core as official open source, that's true, but it's a relatively recent thing.
- Netflix - moved from delivering discs to streaming and moved their entire infrastructure to AWS and CDNs
- Amazon - went from just being a first party retailer to being a marketplace, AWS, and Alexa.
- Apple - as of last quarter all five of their major verticals are large enough to be a F200 company by itself.
- Facebook -- Instagram and WhatsApp were acquisitions but it didn't ruin either and they are both larger than they would have been.
- Google -- well still just a one trick pony - search ads (as far as profits) no matter how many things they against a wall.
I worked on dev tools at Google and recall many efforts over the years to try to unify the customer experience -- between internal and external tools, Go and Dart, Android and Chrome devtools, etc. Things always lurched in one direction or another, but never consistently. It was always above someone's pay grade to choose one or the other, so you ended up with both.
Convincing engineers on devtools to abandon their babies is indeed hard!
On the other hand, I think if you dig deep, Microsoft still has all the legacy, but they cover it up with a lot of branding. Hence the top comment in this thread about confusing branding.
Like asp.net core was meant to be incompatible with .net full framework because of inconsistent featureset, is that going away? For applications, .Net core binaries are different from .net full binaries, they compile to a .dll, not an executable .exe, you have to run them with a command line (and if you choose the option to create an exe it comes with lots of additional binaries that aren't required in full .net framework, plus I understand some additional problems of version compatibility with the installed .net framework). So is .net 5 going to be one or the other? Or is .net 5 just another way of saying that they are discontinuing the full .net framework and that now everything will have to be .net core? But then is a simple full .net framework 4.7.1 .exe run on .net 5?
Just to add to the confusion, you can target an ASP.Net Core Application to run using .Net Framework.
When re-reading the article, I think what they are implying is that they are ceasing support for .net full framework and just renaming .net core ".net". If it is the case it is kind of a big deal, there is ton of .net full code outthere, that no one has any appetite to convert. If it is not the case, are they going to rename .net full to something else?
This article does the opposite of solving any confusion.
[edit] there is a session in a couple of hours at Build, perhaps it will add clarity: https://mybuild.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/77031#t...
Moving projects from .Net Framework to .Net 5 should be as easy or hard as it was to go from Framework to Core. In my case, this isn't a problem for the current project that I'm working on, but thankfully Microsoft will support .Net Framework 4.8 in maintenance mode for a very long time.
They are achieving this by bringing Mono more "in-the-fold", making it interchangeable with CoreCLR, and ensuring CoreFX runs on every runtime.
It seems that are leaning on Mono because of it's AOT abilities, which doesn't say good things about the future for CoreRT.
I like the idea of using Mono though, it's easier to embed in native applications.
I'm personally happy to see more of the .NET Core stuff end up in Mono since it usually is battle tested and has better compatibility, and I'm also happy to see more stuff approximating the existing .NET Framework and Mono workflows since .NET Core has historically been unable to do important things that netframework and mono can do.
bias disclosure: I work on Mono
Which you can use .NET Core with!
I tried about 5 searches but didn't find anything useful so far.
That's perfectly normal.
There is no such thing as "Cross Platform .NET"
The C# language and the.NET Framework does indeed run on almost all platforms, but that pretty much ends here in terms of "portability".
Anything beyond that is "platform specific"
For instance, building "desktop" applications is either UWP with advanced styling and reactive data binding but only for Windows or GTK# with Mono which is very limited.
For Mobile either Xamarins.Forms for Android + iOS but it's very limited in terms of features, or it's Xamarin.iOS + Xamarin.Android which require platform specific code for UI / Routing and many others OS specific functions.
For Web , the WASM Binary is something like 5MB+ which makes it not reasonable compared to an app written in Plain JavaScript or TypeScript.
There is still a long way to go for C# to be really "cross platform"
IMO, that's not entirely accurate, and does .NET a bit of a dis-service.
.NET Framework isn't cross-platform, and doesn't pretend to be - it's Windows only.
.NET Core is cross-platform, with runtimes for Windows, Linux and MacOS.
Regarding Xamarin, I guess you haven't used it for a while? Until very recently, I had the same opinion, but only because it was years since I had used it - turns out it's rather good now!
Where cross-platform ends is really with desktop GUIs - web apps, web APIs, console apps, backend processing services/daemons etc, all of these work very well across the supported platforms, and the only time you'll likely write platform-specific code is the rare cases when you need to pinvoke into native DLLs.
Aside from the likes of Electron, I'm not sure there really is a good cross-platform solution for desktop GUIs. Microsoft would be hailed as heros if they ever crack that one :)
Microsoft used to follow the eat-your-own-dogfood rule, which would seem to indicate that the development tools should use the same run-time and run on all the targets, but the announcement only mentions linux as a target. As a hobby-only-on-linux-only developer who does not buy or sell any software or related services, I find this announcement a poke in the nose with a clue stick.
And Java is fine, for varying definitions of "fine". I have yet to see any Java application that looks good, aside from a couple IDEs, and none that look good across platforms.